Intro Lesson:
In the morning, all the students grouped in a classroom at the Beacon School. Celeste drew a map of New York City and gave the children the opportunity to label as many parts of the city they recognized. After that, she explained to them that we would be riding to the East River and outlined the route we would take. In addition, she also revealed to everyone that the word of the day was “bicycle”, derived from the Greek words “bi” and “cycle”, “two” and “wheel” respectively. The kids were all extremely eager to go out to start riding, so we finished our morning discussion with quick trivia questions testing their knowledge of Greek prefixes followed by “cycle”, i.e. uni-, tri-, quadra-, penta-, etc.

East River Ride
Today was our first ride of the season! We started out at the Beacon School and walked our bikes down 96th St. to the East River Esplanade. We then got on our bikes and traveled north to towards the end of the bike path at 125th St. Along the way, we stopped at a lookout point and spotted our mascot – the cormorant! We also collected a water sample using a jar connected to piece of string. Clarence threw the jar and Noor was holding the string to reel the sample up from the river. Once we reached 125th St., we took a break and Steven took a group picture of all the Cyclopedians! We learned that right across the river on Randall’s Island, at Icahn Stadium, Usain Bolt broke the world record in the 100m dash to become the fastest man on earth.

After the break, we continued south along the bike path towards Carl Schurz Park. On the way, we stopped to find our first geocache. The clue was “look tree times before giving up!” It turned out that the geocache was hidden in a cluster of three trees. After signing the geocache to say we were there, we headed to the park for lunch. We sat down in a shady green space to eat and relax. We played Ninja and Alberto found us a water balloon to play with. Unfortunately, the balloon popped on Noor before we were able to play hot potato. The Cyclopedians wanted to find another geocache, but unfortunately, after many minutes of searching, we were unable to find the cache. Then, after refilling our bottles, we started our journey again on the bike path. At 81st St., we went into the streets for a detour, since there was construction on the bike path. We re-entered the bike path at 77th St. and headed all the way south to the end of the bike path near the Queensboro Bridge.

At the southern end of the bike path was our hill challenge. The first challenge was to ride all the way up the steep hill without stopping. Everyone made it! The second challenge was to go back down the hill as slowly as possible. After the challenge, we headed back north back to Beacon. On the way, Noor found another geocache! After returning back to the school, we ended the day by doing some more bike riding in the playground.

We learned many new things on our journey – how to ride safely as a team, brake with two hands, and find geocaches! Everyone had a great time and we are excited for the rest of the summer!